i got a 300 gig western digital hard drive, its an ide drive. my bios recongnizes it as 300 gig, my device manager sees it also, but when i click on my computer its not there just my dvd rom drives and my partitioned 80 gig. why isnt it there??? is it a bad HD?
control panel -> administrative tools -> computer management -> storage -> disk management -> locate the drive and right click and format it
ok thanks. im formatting it now, but its only showing it at 128 gig. after its done will it be the 300 gig?
ok i formatted it but it only shows it at 128 gig... how do i get it to show the full capacity of the HD?
Hmmm... If you done what flip said through admin tools then dont know why it aint worked... you could try this it Might work... Goto "My Computer > Right Click your new Hard Drive > Select Fromat > Make sure the file system is set to "NTFS" > Check "Quick format" > Click Start.." If not try it without the "Quick Format" checked, so it will do a full format....
you need Service Pack 1 installed to recognized drivers larger than 128 GB. do you have this in and functioning?
Auslander, My O/S recogined my 250GB HDs with no SP installed. I was running a corporate edition of XP Pro w/o SP1 or SP2. @68b_body, can you post your system specs?
i think the "corporate edition" part of that explains why it was recognized flip, but i'm probably wrong. *shrugs* i've never used larger then 80 gig drives, so i'm going off what i've seen posted around here before. yeah, specs would definiately help
xp or some xp versions didn't solve that issue as there is threads on it in this forum & all other topics
i downloaded the WD data lifeguard and used it to format the HD and it worked it reads 279 gigs. thanks for all the help!
Greetings: A followup - My Dell Dim8250 will recognise my WD 300 Gig HD as a secondary drive, but even after using the 'Data Lifeguard' software to make it a bootable drive (as a 300 G drive), it won't boot from it. The Dell says it doesn't see the drive at all. My Bios is A03. I know that A04 is out, but it doesn't say anything about addressing any hard drive problems. I'm running XP SP2. Going in thru the Admin Tools, it shows as a bootable drive, so all I can figure is the BIOS on the Dell can't handle such a large drive. Am I screwed? Please advise.
As a followup to my followup - I updated to the A04 BIOS and that didn't help. I tried each combination in turn for the boot drive (including as a single drive, and as master with a slave; with & without the cable select and even the alternate jumper settings...). Is there any chance that it's just a window's quirk and I need to run something to *really* make it a bootable drive? Still looking for hints...
Set the 300gb as your main drive (master) then put the XP CD in and boot from it on startup, let xp setup go..... You have tried a fresh install of xp on the 300gb wright?
Greetings: After trying all sorts of stuff, here is what worked. -initial steps: install as slave, use WD 'data lifeguard' to partition and format and copy old drive -booted off xp cdrom & went to the recovery console -did a 'chkdsk /r' (took forever!) -did a 'fixboot' -rebooted and it worked just fine as a boot drive. Hope that helps. Other things I did which didn't seem to help (but might be necessary) -updated bios (dell a04 for dimension 8250) -tried various updated fdisk routines on various bootable disks from various sites) as 'fdisk /mbr' -cable select switch on the WD drive (presently on, haven't tried to boot the system without it) -various alternate jumper settings from WD docs & website Thanks for the ideas (from this and many other threads).
